Articles with the Tag Egypt
Saying stupid things about Egypt: blame the media
How not to be a dumbass about Egypt; aimed at Americans:
“The Twitter Revolutionâ€. No, this is the Revolution of the Egyptian people. Egyptians resisted for decades. They were tortured, jailed and repressed by the Mubarak and Sadat regimes. Twitter and Facebook are tools. They did not stand in front of the water canons, or go to jail for all these years to get the credit. There were demonstrations all summer long and for a several years through out Egypt but they are rarely covered, because we are worried about what Sarah Palin said, or some moronic Imam saying something stupid. Does it sound a bit arrogant to take credit for a people’s struggle?
It’s a bit unfair to blame yer Average American for this sort of misconception, when so much of the mainstream news coverage is hideously stupid, with the commentary even worse. For example, I saw bits of the European Unions’ pronouncements about the revolution and it was so obviously disconnected from the reality on the ground as seen on Twitter, blogs and Al-Jazeera, with its focus on wanting a “peaceful dialogue between government and the people” rather than actually siding directly with the people struggling for democracy. If the news coverage is all slanted towards what powerful people in the west think how Egypt must forward and how the White House should manage the situation and most of the socalled experts shown are deeply compromised through links to the American foreign policy bureaucracies, how easy is it for normal people to understand what’s really going on?
EU will not interfere in Egypt
Making a huge change from all those years that our governments did support Mubarak, the EU has said it won’t interfere in Egypt’s internal affairs:
“I’m certain the European Union today will signal to people of good will in Egypt and Tunisia that we’re ready to help organise elections, but not to interfere.”
In more relevant news, the Egyptian army has said it won’t use violence on the protestors, according to Al-Jazeera. With businesses and banks closed and tourists returning in droves, the protest movement has called for a general strike on Wednesday. The economic pressure on Mubarak to either leave or crackdown are therefore increasing rapidly, but as it seems he’s starting to lose the military, repression may just be too late.
The roots of Egypt’s class conflict
Juan Cole offers a short history lesson on the roots of the Egyptian revolution. His conclusion:
The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.
Egyptian revolution continues
It’s been another eventful day in Egypt and more and more this feels like what watching the revolutions taking place in Eastern Europe in 1989 felt like — but hopefully Egypt won’t be another China. The best place to watch it all go down is still Al Jazeera,as the official Wikileaks twitter also acknowledges: Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes.
For us watching from the outside in it’s hard to understand what is going on now in Egypt, but one thing is clear: this is a spontaneous uprising, fueled by the despair and anger of the average Egyptian, not something organised by either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist organisations, or by what’s left of the secular leftwing opposition to Mubarak. This doesn’t stop the western defence analysis community from invoking the old Islamist terror bugbears of course. And as discussed at Blood and Treasure, Mubarak’s new vicepresident and prime minister are both hardliners not adverse to using violence to solve their problems. Which may mean that either Mubarak is preparing to unleashthe army (if it let’s itself be unleashed at this point) or that the security services are mounting their own coup first against Mubarak, then against the protestors. But can they stop this spirit?
(Ignore the horrid music)
Aussie net magazine Crikey reports on one of the more interesting cyberspace aspects of the Tunesian and Egyptian revolutions, the involvement of the 4chan hackers’s movement Anonymous in helping the protestors communicate with the rest of the world as well as attacking government communication channels. However:
It is also profoundly at odds in its ethos and methods with traditional NGOs and activist groups. This is not your traditional protest movement and elements of it would be deeply hostile to more traditional political activism. Anonymous is something that, because it grew organically in cyberspace rather than reflecting the cyber version of existing real world phenomena, looks and works differently to real-world organisations or movements we’re familiar with. Something important and new is happening here.
See also Barret Brown: Anonymous: a net gain for liberty.
In the end, Anonymous has so far done more than the US government to encourage the movement for democracy in Egypt, since, as Simon Tisdall said in The Guardian on Friday:
That’s because, in the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and influential country, in its corner. That’s the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt’s demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.
Much nearer to the truth than the insultingly bad propaganda coming from some circles that these protests have been supported by the US, as supposedly proven by certain leaked embassy files.